E-commerce site accounts hard to get rid of

How difficult is it to get rid of an online account? Privacy International (PI) have managed to get the UK's Information Commissioner to take a look at the problem of the difficulty there appears to be in ridding yourself of an account on sites like Amazon or eBay.

PI reports that its researchers found an Amazon account "exists for evermore" and that on eBay, it took several trained researchers quite some time before they could track down the account-deletion function. Under the 1998 Data Protection Act companies are legally required to allow people to delete such information, but it appears that certain sites make it very difficult to do so.

Sites such as YouTube and MySpace received praise from Privacy International for having an easy to locate delete account button on their account-management page. Its shocking that dot-com giants such as eBay and Amazon won't make it so easy.